le hasard fait bien les choses

he association of ideas cr

DURATION: 30.09.2022 – 13.11.2022

Curated by Jessica Macor & Yimei Zhang Binda 

Le hasard fait bien les choses brings into dialogue the shots of two young photographers, Ludovica De Santis and Andrea Basileo, questioning the practice of the snapshot, its relationship with chance and everyday life.

"Le hasard fait bien les choses" means "chance makes things succeed", and this expression is a French proverb that alludes to fortunate coincidences, serendipities, a beneficent fate that everyday life sometimes confronts us with, causing us to exclaim with amazement. But chance is an element that those involved in photography must learn to seize on the fly, to unleash, to make malleable, in order to immortalize their subjects at a given moment in the form of a snapshot. The notion of accidentality becomes then for some artists the very instrument of their craft, to the same extent as the camera: the conditio sine qua non of their practice.

Le hasard, therefore, chance. The term recalls the title of the famous poem Un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard (1897) by symbolist writer Stéphane Mallarmé, which André Breton decided to include in his first manifesto within a list of authors who could be defined as ante-litteram surrealists. In this way, the fortuitous association of very distant elements of everyday life, as the result of fructuous chance operations dear to the Surrealists, became an artistic process since the first part of the 20th century.

But in the essay The Invention of Everyday Life (1980), anthropologist Michel de Certeau analyses the different, little-studied and mostly invisible ways of doing that people enact in their everyday life. In fact, according to the French theorist, everyone implements 'tactics' to escape predetermined mechanisms and systems. These tactics consist in 'seizing opportunities', in challenging events and contingencies to turn them to one's favour. But they also consist in combining heterogeneous elements, whose intellectual synthesis would not become a discourse, but a decision, an act and a way of 'seizing the opportunity': an example of which could be the act of taking a snapshot of an unrepeatable moment, before it slips away.

These relationships between chance, occasion, and the association of very different elements in everyday life constitute both the production mode, according to the way photography is being practised by the exhibiting artists, and the main theme addressed in the actual photographic prints on display.

The reference to French literature and theory, however, is anything but coincidental. Although it does not explicitly inform the work of the two photographers, both Ludovica De Santis and Andrea Basileo have a special bond with Paris, as they have both lived in this city. The former, in fact, studied film theory and history at the Sorbonne, graduating with a thesis on narrative techniques in Soviet cinema before returning to Italy and settling in the Lombard capital; on the other hand, the photographer from Ticino, after graduating in photography at the IED in Milan, has divided his life since 2017 between Geneva and Paris, as freelance photographer for major high-fashion brands. Two intersecting, and chiastic paths, which, in addition to being united by the coincidence of their geographical itinerary, also present a clear similarity in their approach to photography.

Indeed, both De Santis and Basileo bring a particularly emotional and intimate look to the subjects immortalized by their cameras: skilled portraitists, they know how to bring out feelings and atmospheres from the shutter. Practicing the art of street photography, Ludovica De Santis tells stories of provincial boredom and loneliness by placing her gaze on expressions and details that are usually ignored. Andrea Basileo instead, in his extemporaneous portraits, emphasizes everyday life and its eccentricities within the domestic sphere, between playful and uncanny moments. Two sides of the same coin, complementary and capable of visually capturing the surprises of chance in contemporary life.

In addition, the artists are asked to bring along objects that will be part of the exhibition itself: reference books, small utensils, souvenirs, artifacts of everyday life. Without disturbing the concept of ready-made, these objects are capable of evoking even more vividly the atmosphere in the shots, or to create an imaginative counter-field thanks to the association of ideas created by the visitors themselves